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Attention former/current Dynamics GP (Great Plains), I'm interested to hear your experience with using the Dynamics GP Microsoft Word Add-In.
For those who don't know what that is:
https://www.encorebusiness.com/blog/microsoft-dynamics-gp-add-microsoft-word
https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2016/02/creating-word-template-microsoft-dynamics-gp
Acumatica is looking into doing something similar. My friend Vladimir Panchenko reached out to me and asked what I thought about this idea. If you don't know Vladimir, he is one of the developer brains behind Report Designer and Generic Inquiries in Acumatica.
My first thought was about Dynamics GP because it's a very similar situation in that Dynamics GP has a built-in report writer like Report Designer (that's why I'm posting this in the Report Designer forum). But they still created an Add-In for Microsoft Word.
My question to those Dynamics GP (Great Plains) people out there is, "was the Microsoft Word Add-In useful in practice"? Or doesn't it just "sound" cool?
I know this post is from a few years ago, did anything ever happen with this? As a company trying to implement Acumatica, a word add-in would be extremely helpful for us. In our current system, we have multiple master documents coded to pull standard information, but they open in word making editing easy and automatically saving a copy of the edited document to the associated record. Without a word add-in, it appears that the only way we could make our process work in Acumatica is to create our master documents as new reports in report designer for coding purposes. We would then need to print to a pdf, open using a pdf editor to make any changes, then save the edited version and attach as a file to the corresponding record. This is a lot of extra steps, for something that seems very simple, especially since the system we are moving from is 16+ years old. I'd love to know if a word add-in has already been created or if it's still on the table for one to be created. Thanks!
I haven't heard any updates on this from an Acumatica perspective. I suspect that it was a curiosity thing that didn't go anywhere.
I did though have a conversation by e-mail a while back with someone who had built mail merge functionality into Word that could read from Acumatica Generic Inquiries. That might get you what you need. I just sent him an e-mail to see if he wants to reply on this discussion.
Hi Michelle (@mnecaise) and thanks for the prod Tim.
We did indeed create a Word add-in for a customer that linked to a GI. The add-in needs installing and when Tim tried it for me it didn't quite work out for him, we think because of Trust settings. The add-in used the older version of OData and was created because, whilst you can easily create an OData link in Excel and then link Excel through to Word as a mail merge source, it was a messy solution that required too many IT literate user steps.
Our add-in, once installed, needs a couple of steps in the first instance to be run from the Acumatica Ribbon bar it adds. These steps are run through for each new merge master, and the settings are to attach the document to (a) An Acumatica instance, (b) A GI within that instance and optionally (c) Specify a "search" field for selection of the record you want to merge from out of the GI data. Once that was done you then proceeded to enter the fields to be merged (this is where it handed over to Word's internal mechanisms) and then complete your merge in the normal ways.
We were going to try and improve the installer but never bothered as nobody else in the world seemed to have what we considered a pretty basic need - a link to Word so that complex documents could be created using data pulled from Acumatica (our particular case was for a construction/manufacturing customer with complex quote documents which the report designer wouldn't handle yet alone the standard notification template tool).
If you would like us to pick this up again I would be more than willing to look at afresh. All we need is someone willing to put the work in with us to test it and feedback.
My direct email is graham.martin@kiss-uk.com - if we connect on there I can bring a new thread up with Tim included (if he wants to be). Once we have something solid, we can publish the result on this thread and make it available to all. What do you think?
All the best,
Graham
@gmartin Graham, thanks so much for your response, and Tim, @timrodman, thanks so much for looping him in. Today is our official go live date, so the next few days are going to be a little hectic. I'll plan to talk with our team and get back to you as soon as possible. We were absolutely shocked that no one else was needing this option. If this is something that we can help make a reality, it would make a huge difference in some of the workarounds we have had to come up with. Looking forward to talking with you soon.
Michelle
@gmartin I actually have a meeting set up with our IT department for this morning to review. I should have some kind of feedback over to you this afternoon. Thanks for checking in!
I asked Tim permission to reply to you here about our product.
At Heuristyc, we developed PowerDoc, a product that facilitates this integration between Word and Acumatica. I have attached the PowerDoc brochure for your reference and included a demo video below.
Please feel free to review the materials and let me know your thoughts. Thank you.
www.heurisrtyc.com